Drone System Design Concepts

Drone System Design Concepts

The drone or quadcopter that we will be looking at shall have the basic logical design elements of most other drones or unmanned vehicles.

The very rough diagram below provides a logical seperation of electrical items in the drone that shall allow the operator ( you ) to communicate with the flight controller to change engines speeds to affect drone altitude and direction and airspeed.

The Remote Controller selection also requires consideration of the receiver, which should come with the controller. As usual there are a lot of controllers in the market place, so this requires careful consideration for range and handling performance.
A big consideration for the remote controller is the number of channels available and number of Axis that are able to be controlled, later we might want to assign a switch on the controller to perhaps get the UAV to return home or emit a buzzer, if we lose sight of it.

The Flight Controller takes the Receiver inputs and applies them to the motors via the ESC.
There are a few flight controllers out there, but we are looking at the NAZE 32 in the beginning, as there is a possibility to change the boards firmware, more on this later...

The ESC is an Electronic Speed Controller, which should be matched to the motor that might be selected for the drone, again motors have varying power loads, voltages and currents, the ESC
may have firmware on board that may be customisable, but this depends on the ESC.
We will cover this in great detail in another blog.

Of couse, all of these design components may be modified to provide better performance, where battery performance for longer flights or speed performance with less flying time.

So what did we miss out this time?

We missed out from the design everything about visual aids and recording of flight data.

We missed out the fact that we can add a video transmitter and camera and fly the drone using a display and controller on the ground with our eyes seeing what the drone is seeing...

We also missed out the fact that we can also record everything that the drone sees, either with a small digital camera or even a Go Pro attached to the drone.

We also missed out Telemetry components, where the drone can transmit altitude, speed, position and otther discretes that we could incorporate into a groundstation system, perhaps an IPad or PC?

These functions cost more money to implement, but can open up different areas to flying a UAV, such as recording flight video and posting on youtube to let everyone see where you have flown.

The Law and Airspace

There are laws governing drones and there are reporting requirements for civil aerospace use of drones, we cover this in other blogs, but it's all about being safe flying your drone.

Remember, be safe and responsible.

Bob Pickles
rgpickles@googlemail.com